Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Music / Post No Bills New York Eye and Ear Control--the footage to go with the sound
Posted by Peter Margasak on Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 3:28 PM
The music for New York Eye and Ear Control by experimental Canadian filmmaker Michael Snow (reissued for the umpteenth time by ESP-Disk last spring) has almost always gotten more attention than the film itself. The 1964 session featured one of the greatest lineups of the free-jazz era--saxophonist Albert Ayler, trumpeter Don Cherry, saxophonist John Tchicai, trombonist Roswell Rudd, bassist Gary Peacock, and drummer Sunny Murray (sometimes spelled "Sonny," as you can see to the left)--engaged in intense collective improvisation, their sharp give-and-take rolling through relative calm and thunderous chaos.
The film was also known as "Walking Woman," after the silhouetted female form that turns up in many of the scenes. I don't know why I hadn't heard about this before, but the recent CD reissue claims the image was based on pianist and composer Carla Bley--then a new presence on the New York scene. It was also printed on original versions of the soundtrack record's label.
New York Eye and Ear Control will be screened as part of a free Snow program presented by the Experimental Film Club at the University of Chicago this Friday at 7 PM. It's at the school's Film Studies Center in Cobb Hall (5811 South Ellis, room 307). You can find the complete program at the Film Studies center Web site.
Today's playlist:
Mitsuhiro Yoshimura, Toshiya Tsunoda, and Taku Sugimoto, Santa (Presquile)
Ahmad Jamal, It's Magic (Dreyfus)
Scott DuBois, Banshees (Sunnyside)
Ricardo Villalobos, Vasco (Perlon)
Soren Kjærgaard, Ben Street, and Andrew Cyrille, Optics (ILK)
Showing 1-2 of 2
There may be some confusion here due to the fact that one of Snow's Walking Woman pieces was titled "Carla Bley" (1965): http://tinyurl.com/MSnowCBley But the Walking Woman form was not, to my knowledge, based on Bley: [pdf] http://cybermuse.beaux-arts.ca/cybermuse/docs/SnowClip8_e.pdf "In late 1960 Michael Snow made several naturalistic flat cut-out cardboard figures which use the wall as their background. In early 1961, to make one of these, he drew, then cut-out with a matte knife a side view of a female figure walking, 152 cm tall within a drawn rectangle on a piece of cardboard. No model was used." more on the WW: "...all his work between 1961 and 1967 used the outline or silhouette of the original cut-out as both tool and subject. The original contour was always the same but depicted in many ways with many mediums, graphite, ink, watercolour, acrylic, enamel, spray paints and oil on various surfaces: paper, cardboard, canvas and other wood, a car door, etc. Many photographic works and films and performance works were made." + see Snow's recently-published "Biographie Of The Walking Woman"
Jason, thanks for the clarifications. I suppose the reason this might've seemed like new info was because it's incorrect. The stuff about Bley and "Walking Women" came from the new liner notes by ESP's Bernard Stollman.
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